Child Soldiers in Uganda

Children and families in Gulu, Uganda today.

It is now over one year since peace talks between the Ugandan
government and the Lord's Resistance began in Sudan. A year later
little has changed and people are still suffering, especially women and
children.

The endless war in northern Uganda has affected
mostly women and children. Many women have become widows as a result of
the rebels killing their husbands. Consequently, they are overloaded
with the heavy responsibility of looking after orphans.

And
women do not have time to rest. They wake up early in the morning to
find ways of feeding their children, with whom they have to move long
distances in search of food. At the end of the day, they come back very
tired, and so stressed and frustrated that they cannot sleep at night.

The
majority of women are suffering due to the loss of their husbands and
relatives. They look for money to take their children to school yet
they have no proper source of income, nobody to give them a hand,
because almost everybody finds herself in the same situation.

Children in the aftermath of war

The SOS Social Centre in
Gulu supports over 250 children and mothers in the community who have
been affected by the civil war with counseling, and medical,
nutritional and educational support. Former child soldiers also receive
counseling.

Education, health care and employment are human
rights. Due to poverty, illness and the political unrest in the area,
the number of children without the support of their natural family is
increasing steadily and SOS Children is constantly developing its
approach to child care in order to meet these changing needs.The aim of
our “Family Strengthening Programmes” and SOS Social Centres is to
respond realistically and effectively to the situation of orphans,
vulnerable children and their families and to prevent child
abandonment. Through skills training, literacy classes, education,
counseling and improved nutrition the families know they can become
independent, self-reliant and confident in their own ability to provide
for the children in their care. Ultimately the communities want to care
for their children.

The Social Centre opened in June 2002 and currently provides all the
services mentioned above to 250 children and female guardians/mothers.
The parents/guardians are also supported with training in agriculture
and tailoring, for example, and those who want to set up small
businesses are offered business training and micro loans; they will
ultimately be more able to financially and emotionally support the
children in their care and this lessens the risk of child abandonment.
We also run a day-care centre for 50 children from single-parent
families here, and the SOS Medical Centre, which is part of the SOS
Social Centre, cares for 60-80 patients per day (roughly 25,500 people
each year). The patients receive health counseling (for example,
counseling for people affected by HIV/AIDS), health education and
immunization programmes. Preventative medical services are the mainstay
of this clinic, but medicines are also provided to the sick.

Socially, most women have low self-esteem as a result of this war
that has left with them lifelong bad memories. Either they have been
sexually abused by the rebels and other people taking advantage of war,
or they have been abducted from their families and taken to the bush,
where they have seen their loved ones being killed. They find
themselves lonely and isolated leading to low self-esteem and inability
to cope in the society.

Many young women are child mothers who
bore children after being forced into marriage by the rebels at a young
age. This has affected their own mothers who see their daughters
returning home, at the age of 20, with several children. And the social
life of the local Acholi women has greatly changed. Some women have
become unfaithful while others have unwanted pregnancies and end up
either aborting or abandoning the babies on failing to be supported.

Children are traumatised

Children,
on the other hand, have been very much abused. They return home from
the bush when they are mentally traumatised and unable to live with
other normal children. They display inappropriate behaviour to the
extent that handling them requires specialists, who are lacking in our
community. Men have abandoned their families and children have suffered
most. This explains why there is an increasing number of street
children in Gulu town and other towns in northern Uganda.

However,
despite the overwhelming numbers of needy children, SOS Children is
playing a very important role in preventing child abandonment and
catering for the orphaned and abandoned children of northern Uganda.
For the sake of the women and children of northern Uganda, the peace
talks must not fail.

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